I am pleased to announce the publication of A History of Rhetoric, Sound, and Health and Healing, generously open access from funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation.
For rhetorical scholars who conduct fieldwork, chapter 5 offers the research concept sound in all research (SiAR).
- chapter 1 orients and prepares readers by providing sound and sound-related terminology; proposes medico-sonic knowledge as a blend of different kinds of listening; resists ocular centrism and a visual sensory hegemony; and describes pan-historiography and the content in chapters 2–5.
- chapter 2 provides a touchstone for percussion and auscultation (two important diagnostic methods), including more recent contexts for these mainstay medico-sonic bodily assessment tools. Using pan-historiography, chapter 2 rhetorically explores likely origins of medico-sonic practices in ancient health and healing systems in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Greece, and Italy. Two primary questions in this chapter ask:
- Historically, how has sound been used in ancient, traditional, and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) health systems?
- And how does ineffable bodily sound in health and healing use rhetoric?
- chapter 3 explores how French physician René Theophile-Hyacinthe Laënnec—the stethoscope’s creator—popularized auscultating (or listening to) heart, lungs, and other organs with a textbook for gathering and disseminating medico-sonic knowledge—an historical moment memorializing medico-sonic interpretations of the body mediated by rhetoric. The chapter responds to 4 questions:
- How does Laënnec use rhetoric in de l’auscultation mediate to create medico-sonic knowledge about the body?
- How does his use of rhetoric persist today?
- What modern health and healing technologies use sound diagnostically, prognostically, and therapeutically?
- How do sounds from healthcare technologies discipline bodies?
- chapter 4 responds to one primary question—what influence does unintentional sound have in health and healing contexts? In reply, chapter 4 offers a neonatal intensive unit case study that uses the concept rhetorical ventriloquism to illuminate healthcare technologies, their sounds, and the rhetorical work they do. From a larger study of nurse-caregiver communication in NICUs in Denmark and the United States, qualitative interviews and observations show how healthcare technologies produce intentional sounds while they also discipline bodies within a NICU.
- chapter 5 emanates from the idea that researchers in health, healing, and hospital contexts are accountable for sound and what they hear—and can be—by acting as earwitnesses. The question driving the final chapter arises from sound in all research (SiAR) as a research concept and practice: how can researchers who engage in fieldwork—or individuals who work with those who do—behave responsibly toward sound (or its absence) and its likely effects in research spaces? Chapter 5 provides practical examples for acting as responsible researchers and extends rhetoric’s role to the sonic in fieldwork.
Cordially,
Kristin
University of Bern
Faculty of Medicine
Department of Clinical Research
Dr. Kristin Marie Bivens, PhD (she/her)
Head, Education
Head, Patient and Public Involvement Program
EUPATI-Trained on patient Engagement Fundamentals
sitem-inselFreiburgstrasse 33010 BernSwitzerland
kristin.bivens